Twelve Free Tools to Help Your Business Succeed

Free Marketing Tools

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the leading email marketing service providers with many tools to help small businesses. Manage your contacts, send targeted emails to a segment of your audience, and use its analytics tools to improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns. It also helps you set up autoresponders and customise email designs to suit your brand.

MeetingBurner

Whether you need to share information with clients or give prospects an exclusive presentation, MeetingBurner can help with its free meeting and webinar service. You can live stream a video or presentation for up to 10 people for free, and modify content – such as registration pages – to suit your target audience.

Free Productivity Tools

Evernote

Evernote is a suite of software and services designed for storing notes, pictures, audio, web pages, and more. Its mobile app means you can also collaborate with colleagues when you’re on the go. Once you add the app to your computer, tablet and smartphone, it will sync automatically to update your work on all your devices.

Google Calendar

This free online calendar allows you to view and edit events on any device, set up text reminders, post invitations, add calendar events directly from Gmail, and much more. It’s easy to keep track of social and work events all in one place and you can share your schedule with colleagues. With new features being added all the time, it’s worth looking into.

Free Collaborative Tools

Dropbox

This cloud-based, file synchronisation service lets you store documents, photos, and videos in the cloud. You can then share these files easily and securely with colleagues and clients. When you set up your free Dropbox account, you can specify who can add and access content to your account. It’s an incredibly useful tool for keeping up to date with colleagues and clients,
whether you are at the office, at home, or on the move.

Skype

Skype is often underestimated as a business tool. Apart from the free Skype to Skype calls – wherever you are in the world – it also provides small businesses with free collaborative tools to help teams work together remotely. Skype lets you share your screen, transfer files, instant message, and more.

Free Social Media Tools

SocialMention

This free app monitors over 100 social media channels, allowing you to track in real time what people are saying about your company, products, competitors, or any topic you choose. You can ask it to perform highly specific searches or search using more generic keywords – it’s up to you.

HootSuite

Managing your social media channels can be a daunting task, but Hootsuite is helping many small businesses streamline their social media operations. You can track mentions from your dashboard and also post updates to all your channels (or a combination of channels), selecting times that are convenient for you.

Free Project Management Tools

Insightly

Insightly helps you manage all your contacts, tasks, and projects across multiple devices. Use it to set up email reminders, share files, and much more. It also integrates with Google Apps, MailChimp, and many social media sites. As it’s web-based, you don’t have to worry about backups, upgrades, and security. Insightly have implemented comprehensive security measures to protect your data.

Asana

Asana is one of the best free project management tools, helping you manage team projects efficiently by streamlining communication and monitoring tasks. Instead of a mass of disjointed emails, Asana makes it easy to keep all your team’s ideas, tasks,
and files in one place with a user-friendly interface.

Free Monitoring Tools

Google Analytics

Every small business owner should care about the effectiveness of their website. Google Analytics is still one of the most powerful free analytics tools online. Use it to find out how people are finding your website, how many daily visitors you get, how long people stay on your site, and so much more.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is popular with many small businesses for monitoring online conversations. Find out what is being said about your brand, your industry, and your competitors with automatic email updates. Useful for online reputation management, it can help you find and respond to any criticisms of your brand, or quickly track down positive comments.

There are so many free tools that can help small businesses on a limited budget. The trick is finding the ones that help you achieve your business objectives more efficiently.